Metamagical Themas: Introduction

Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

Douglas Hofstadter is the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (GEB). He won the 1979 Nobel prize in nonfiction for it. It has repeatedly popped up on my radar for the better part of a decade, and I’ve wanted to read it for a while. However, I am under the impression it is pretty dense. He has another book titled “I am a Strange Loop.” This book is supposedly a more playful meditation on the logical, rather than neurobiological, structure of the self, but it is not as highly praised as GEB. I have debated reading it instead. After many years of my indecisiveness getting the best of me, I have finally made a decision. I’m going to read a third book of his -Metamagical Themas - which a verified purchaser on Amazon describes as ‘Not as good as GEB’. Let this be a public reminder that despite attempts to be mindful, I am but a monkey.

Metamagical Themas is a collection of essays that Hofstader wrote in the 1980’s organized into 7 sections (with cute alliterations like ‘Structure & Strangeness’, ‘Sanity & Survival’, or ‘Sense & Society’). Chapter names range from ‘Magic Cubology’ and ‘Mathematical Chaos and Strange Attractors’ to ‘Pattern, Poetry, and Power in the music of Frederic Chopin’ and ‘Stuff and Nonsense’. The point is, it is pretty diverse. If I take the time to read a book, I like trying to write book reviews to organize my thoughts. Now that I am 20 pages into this one, I can tell this is dense. So instead, I’m going to summarize my thoughts after each section. This serves as an introduction to that series which will likely take a year to unfold.

I was asked what my book was about the other day while reading before a meeting. At the time, I was unsure how to answer. Somewhere between discussion of self-referencing memes, music, logic, superrationality, Rubik’s cubes, prisoner’s dilemma, genetic code, “default assumptions”, and a bunch of other seemingly unrelated topics, this book seems to be about… I still don’t know. But the best summary I can give is it is a collection of essays all connected by the very thin connection of how the mind philosophically works. Though much less bold, it is similar to Julian Jayne’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (best summarized here) in the sense even though its arguments may not be correct, they are still intriguing and worth thinking about. Section two has an entire chapter dedicated to an analysis of font types and what it really means to be the letter ‘A’. That is a prime example of what I am talking about. I’m not sure if the arguments put forth are completely esoteric, or if they are pointing at something so deeply woven into the fabric of reality such that only a genius could untangle it. But Hofstader has earned a right to say weird stuff. He ran his own column in Scientific American, was the Ph.D advisor of David Chalmers (who formulated the “hard problem of consciousness”, organizes philosophy forums at places like Stanford, and won that Nobel prize. He literally coined the term ‘ambigram’ which are those cool things you probably saw as a child and thought ‘hey this is really interesting’ but all the adults were too cool for. In short, if someone gets to make vague, eccentric claims while insisting they are pointing at something deep, it’s probably him.

So welcome to my brain dump about Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern. They will eventually be hyperlinked below. However, as they roll out, they will come straight to your inbox.

Section 1: Snags & Snarls
Section 1: Sense & Society
Section 1: Sparking & Slipping
Section 1: Structure & Strangeness Part 1, Structure & Strangeness Part 2
Section 1: Spirit & Substrate
Section 1: Selection & Stability
Section 1: Sanity & Survival